Abstract
Maurice Blondel’s Action (1893) illustrates that the phenomenon of superstition inveigles its way into all forms of human activity, even intellectual pursuits like philosophy and theology, when they insulate themselves from the transcendent in human self-sufficiency. This essay explores how superstition is a constant threat for sacramental theology, manifest in particular, when the heterogeneity of human and divine agency in sacramental synergy is blurred or ignored. It argues that Blondel’s philosophical acumen permits a retrieval of vital insights of the scholastic synthesis, especially the careful distinction between divine agency (opus operatum) and human agency (opus operantis) in the sacramental act.
Sacramental theology is a necessarily synthetic discipline situated at the intersection of all the treatises of dogmatic-systematic theology and drawing on the human sciences in the attempt to further understand the sacred mysteries. It is perhaps because of this synthetic nature that the history of sacramental theology witnesses to imbalance in articulating the relation between the orders of nature and grace, human and divine agency in sacramental action. Either theologians overemphasize the divine in sacramental action at the expense of the human, as Karl Rahner claims of the scholastics, or they focus too much on the human at the expense of the divine, as Colman O’Neill characterizes post-conciliar sacramental theologians. 1 And yet it is imperative for any adequate sacramental theology to articulate the unique synergy of the divine and human in the sacred mysteries that sets them apart from all other human actions, even other pious devotions and prayer, as well as all superstitious practices.
This essay shows how Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of human action, from his seminal work Action (1893), provides an incisive insight into the specific difference between sacrament and superstition that serves as a tool for evaluating any sacramental theology. Through this lens, it turns out that the phenomenon of superstition is a pervasive danger in the theological enterprise, especially for the nature–grace relationship and sacraments. When theologians fail to do justice to the unique synergy of the human and divine agency in the relationship of grace, they end up flirting with what they most recoil from, superstitious action.
Blondel’s philosophical insights into sacramental and superstitious action permit a retrieval of important insights from the theological tradition that have been ignored if not repudiated in recent writing on sacraments: (i) divine action must be at the center of sacramental theology if it is to avoid slipping into a reductionist and, ultimately, superstitious discourse; (ii) divine and human agency in the sacramental synergy must be kept absolutely heterogeneous. In the scholastic synthesis, this was achieved by the careful distinction between the subjective work of the sacramental subject (opus operantis) and the objective divine gift of grace itself (opus operatum). Recent sacramental theology, which either abandons this fundamental distinction in principle, or in practice through some version of ‘symbolic efficacy,’ in fact, risks devolving to superstition, as we shall see.
A caveat is necessary from the outset, in case it appears that we who live in glass houses are about to throw stones—this article does not claim that any theologian is ‘superstitious.’ No-one attempting to contribute to sacramental theology could seriously be accused of something so crude. Rather, it claims that conceptual systems in theology, even if they are the result of earnest attempts by the most devout believer, can if they get the balance between nature and grace wrong, end up in the phenomenon of superstition. No one confuses the theologian with her theology, but this article shines light on a more subtle distinction—between the aspirations of a theologian and what her conceptual system in fact achieves.
The Specific Difference between Sacrament and Superstition in Action (1893)
Many theologians are familiar, at least in passing, with Blondel’s philosophy of action, which has had far-reaching influence on the understanding of grace in 20th-century theology. 2 It is widely known that Blondel’s early work, Action (1893), educes a hypothetical necessity for a supernatural auxiliary through a phenomenological investigation of voluntary human action. Less widely understood, however, is how the phenomenon of superstition plays such a pivotal role in Action (1893).
The driving passion behind Blondel’s entire philosophical oeuvre was the philosophical rehabilitation of the Christian religion against the critique of the Enlightenment. 3 A French Catholic realist in opposition to German Protestant idealism, Blondel’s Action (1893) invites a reading as a rebuttal of the rationalist philosophy of religion, especially Kant’s accusation of superstition against the orthodox understanding of sacraments as giving grace. 4 Sacramental rituals, in Kant’s view, are no different from any other superstitious practice, a natural action arrogating to itself a ‘super-natural’ effect, however vague, of the same category as throwing salt over one’s left shoulder, or stepping around a ladder on the sidewalk, since religion itself in Kant’s system is evacuated of everything but one’s moral standing before God, without any room for grace. 5 And so Action (1893) contains woven through it a rehabilitation of sacraments, along with the other positive and realist teachings of the Christian religion repugnant to Enlightenment rationalism.
Remarkably, the entire dialectic of Action (1893) hinges on the phenomenon of superstition, which functions as a kind of middle term. At the pivotal point, Blondel audaciously turns Kant’s accusation around, arguing that it is the rationalists and not the ‘unlearned devout’ who are guilty of the most insidious form of superstition by an apotheosis of their own ‘thought-as-action,’ finding there the perfection of human action that Blondel’s dialectic demonstrates to be impossible within the natural order. Sacramental action, by contrast, since it requires an explicit admission of human dependence on divine power and agency, has no truck whatsoever with superstitious action. 6
Moreover, sacramental action is set apart from superstition in that sacrament cannot be of purely human inspiration. No action emanating from a purely human initiative could contain the supernatural auxiliary, even if inspired by the most sublime and pious sentiments. Rather, for a finite, determinate, and particular human action to be a receptacle for the supernatural auxiliary, its authority can only come from the divine.
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In other words, either sacramental practice rests on the guaranty of Revelation, or it is simply another form of superstition:
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In order for these ritual acts not to be reduced to an idolatrous fiction or for them to equal the faith whose vivifying expression they must be, it is required that they be, not an invention of man and the always imperfect effect of a natural movement, but the expression of positive precepts and the original imitation of dogma divinely transcribed into distinct commandments … A practice is necessary; and any practice not given as a supernatural order is superstitious. It is nothing if it is not all.
Sacraments as positive precepts must manifest the divine will. While sacraments and superstitious rituals share superficial similarities, a crucial difference lies in the orientation of the will. In sacramental practice, one surrenders to an action believed to be of divine and not purely human origin, ‘sacrificing’ or ‘mortifying’ one’s own will. By contrast, the essence of superstition, as we shall see, is the attempt to administer a supernatural aid to oneself, however vaguely conceived.
Sacraments qua sacraments are not the mere projection of human desire into ritual, therefore. Like the other forms of Revelation, they cannot come from us alone. One cannot consider sacraments in purely human or natural terms by ignoring or sidelining the divine agency, since only that divine agency sets them apart from other human actions, including all superstitious practices.
Finally, the sensory sign of Revelation is never invincible, beating the human will into submission, but acts as a signum contradictionis (sign of contradiction), inviting the voluntary human act of interpretation, in an ‘active passivity’ analogous to receiving a gift. 9 The voluntary human act of interpretation by the destinataire is the principle of Revelation, therefore. Just as scripture and dogma signify in an equivocal way requiring the human effort of interpretation, so too does sacramental action. The sacraments signify on a natural sensory level the supernatural complement that they convey. Therefore, the relationship between sacramental causality and symbolism is at play in keeping the divine and human agencies strictly heterogeneous, as we shall see below in relation to the concept of ‘symbolic efficacy.’
The Phenomenon of Superstition in Action (1893)
With echoes of Augustine, the dialectical principle driving Action (1893) is expressed in terms of a privation at the heart of human action, a drive towards an elusive satiety that the natural order of things cannot provide. It is important to understand, however, that ‘action’ for Blondel refers to any voluntary human activity in which there is a concerted effort of the intellect and the will. 10 This entails a crucial distinction between the idea of action and human action in concrete actuality. They are not equivalent and even thought constitutes voluntary human action, pace Descartes. 11 Accordingly, Blondel envisages no opposition between thoughts or words, on the one hand, and deeds on the other, anticipating the ‘speech act theory’ of linguistic philosophers in the 20th century.
The dialectical principle driving Action (1893) is the disparity between what Blondel terms the ‘willed will’ (« volonté voulue ») and the ‘willing will’ (« volonté voulante »). The ‘willed will’ corresponds to decision, the choice of one particular finite motive out of an unlimited number of other finite motives. The ‘willing will,’ on the other hand, corresponds to the infinite power to choose. Blondel’s dialectic (which he calls a ‘science of practice’) investigates this disparity, as it becomes evident in the more and more complex orders of action resulting from the expansion of the human will out into the universe. The dialectic follows this expansion in search of an object equal to the power of willing, moving outwards to its broadest developments in human society (family, nation, etc.), examining each successive intermediate stage, as if it were what human willing wills ultimately. 12
The willing will is brought to light in the particular choices of the willed will, from the very beginning of sensory activity, to the higher forms of social life. Yet, in this expansion the human will ultimately meets no phenomenal object equal to the infinite power of the willing will. Human beings in their willed will are not sufficient unto themselves. Rather, we always will more than can be found in any of the personal, social or moral forms of action that the dialectic successively examines—Aliquid superest—something is left over. Perfect human action that resolves the disparity, by finding an object equal to the infinite power of human willing, remains elusive. This is where the phenomenon of superstition arises in the dialectic:
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It remains for us to see then how man, in an attempt to perfect himself, tries finally to absorb what escapes him infinitely, to fabricate himself a god in his own fashion and to garner with his own strength alone something to make him self-sufficient. We must study the phenomenon of superstition: the phenomenon; i.e., the necessary manifestation of a need under whatever form it may try to satisfy itself; superstition, i.e., the use of a remainder of human action outside of the real.
In other words, superstition arises from the same imperious need to resolve the disparity between the willed will and the willing will that drives the sincere religious search. Superstition, in contrast to true religious action, however, is the futile attempt of the will to produce by human strength alone, ‘the bond that ties it to the divine and that hands the divine over to it captive and docile.’
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It is a universal tendency issuing from the dynamic of willed human action itself:
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In spreading out, in realizing itself outside, the will cannot find in its objective work all that it harbors in the sanctuary of its interior life. This infinitude which he obscurely feels within and which he needs in order to be what he wants to be, what he is already in desire and intention, the subject draws from himself; he presents to himself, under the form of a symbol or an idol, his own need for completion and perfection; he adores the incommunicable and inexhaustible life whose latent source he bears within himself. It is at the very heart of voluntary action, then, that a mystery resides, and we do not escape the desire of mastering it.
Superstitious action, therefore, is the attempt to achieve ‘perfect’ action on one’s own, to dominate and control what in reality eludes human grasp. 16
In the basic case, superstition involves a tripartite distinction between ‘object,’ ‘cult,’ and ‘feeling’ (« sentiment »). The ‘object’ refers to real finite things in which one tries to embody the infinite tendency of human action, such as ritual objects. The ‘cult’ is the action, often ritual, associated with the object, while the ‘feeling’ (« sentiment ») is the imperious drive to give the willing will what it needs to reach completion, an object equal to its infinite power:
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This surplus of the human act that always exceeds sensible facts and social life, this remainder of strength and will which seems not to know what to latch on to, the natural temptation is to assign it an object, an object, which finite and insufficient like the others, would not of itself have the capacity to receive the homage man gives to it, but which precisely because of its smallness, satisfies man’s double need both to create and to master his god. He wants it to resemble him and to differ infinitely from him.
The superstition of ritual objects is not Blondel’s main concern, however. In fact, many superstitious acts are not focused on an object at all. Rather, human action itself is the object of superstition, collapsing the three elements into two, as ‘object’ merges with ‘cult’ (i.e., determinate action): Object → Cult → Feeling:
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The object of cult, then, somehow projected and created before the adorer, like a mirror wherein the will can reflect its full image and its whole warmth, is only an occasion for the will to know itself better and to learn to equal itself. Hence it is no wonder that man has tried to suppress or to sublimate little by little this intermediary exterior to the inward wish of the heart. It is this necessary genesis and this progressive purification of superstition that we must now study. With the object, the cult, and the feeling, which seem to be the threefold element of every superstitious act, we shall see each one of these terms melt into the next, as man comes to recognize in it an image of his own nature and a more inward need of his consciousness.
This is hardly surprising, given that all kinds of human actions have been ritualized in superstitious practice.
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Provocatively borrowing terminology from sacramental theology, Blondel claims that the ritual action and the ritualized object are the ‘form’ and the ‘matter’ of superstition, in its most obvious forms. The most insidious form of superstition, however, arises when the superstitious action has no determinate or sacral form that sets it apart from other human action.
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Rather, the idol ‘humanizes’ itself and superstition can insinuate itself into all forms of human practice:
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Superstitious action, then, is not limited to constituting a form carefully isolated from every other. As the sacred object comes to be conceived more in the image of the spirit itself, it seems that its transcendence can become immanent to each particular action in order to consecrate it and impress upon it the seal of the infinite that human consciousness demands.
In this way, superstition can inveigle its way into any human activity, even intellectual activities such as the philosophical or theological enterprises, where it might appear to have been most effectively banished. 22 What is at issue is a practical autolatry: finding in one’s ‘thought-as-action’ the perfection and completion of human action that can come only as gift from outside the natural order.
Intellectual Superstition
Superstition arises, therefore, when one’s own action is taken to be ‘self-sufficient’—as if the human will through its own strength becomes the equal of its infinite power, with no further need to look beyond what humans can will or provide for themselves:
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In its effort to fulfill itself and to give its work a character of complete sufficiency, the human will ends up looking for the complement it requires in incomplete action itself. Rather than have recourse to magic formulas or consecrative ceremonies, it avails itself directly of its perfection, as if acts were not self-sufficient and complete because they are religious, but religious and divine because they are fulfilled and complete, because they are ‘moral or human.’
Blondel’s strategy here is to turn the accusations of the ‘enlightened’ against themselves, leading to the conclusion that they, who claim to be most free of superstition, are in fact guilty of what they most detest, superstitious action, since they rely exclusively on what is willed or can be willed by human strength alone. He finds many such examples of superstitious action among the philosophers and religious thinkers of his day. With the exception of Kant, however, Blondel does not name them, though a reader familiar with late 19th-century French philosophy and religious writing can find candidates for the various schools of thought that Blondel considers.
First of all, Blondel paraphrases Kant: ‘Everything that man thinks he can do to make himself pleasing to God other than maintain a good conduct is pure superstition.’ 24 For Kant, duty is independent of all metaphysical ideas and any sensory inclinations. This pretension, however, conceals the claim that human action by its own strength is ‘pleasing to God’: i.e., moral action is the result of pure human freedom and human reason applied to the intelligible world, without any need for transcendence or divine assistance as grace. In reducing religion to ethics and duty, in this way, one makes an idol of human action itself, and so the Kantian project of religion within the bounds of bare reason is a fundamentally superstitious one in Blondel’s view. 25
Moreover, the Enlightenment dismissal of all particular tradition, practice, and ritual, in favor of a religion based on universal precepts derivable from human reason alone, rather than dependent on Revelation, also manifests the same apotheosis of human action:
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Even when he condescends to prescribe special acts toward the first being which his reason acknowledges, he thinks that prayer and adoration proceed from his thought alone and from his own will; and these actions, which he calls religious, are like the others, rid of all parasitic form and all obscure and sacramental rite. His superstition is to make believe that he has none and to think he lives by clear ideas and rational practices; he is triumphant in the thought that he has dislodged the old dogmas. That too is a faith, and how credulous and dogmatic a one!
Notably, however, ‘metaphysicians’ (presumably even devout ones) who would attempt a study of natural religion and so ‘lay hold of the transcendent Being,’ through a system of human ideas also fall into the same superstitious ‘cult.’ In transposing the mystery of the divine into something at the disposal of human power, within the limits of our concepts, even a devout soul can unwittingly make an idol of thought. 27
The same critique applies to the religious ‘dilettante’: i.e., a person who rejects any discipline of conduct following from a commitment to a particular religion or philosophy of life. 28 Such dilettantes practice a ‘cult without object,’ in reality adoring only their own human action. In believing themselves to have unmasked the vanity of everything, they verge back to superstition, since the object of their cult is simply their own voluntary action and nothing more. 29 Fake ‘religiosity’ à la carte involves giving oneself to everything, without giving anything of oneself. Without sacrifice or mortification, it is, in effect, a radical non-committal.
In the religious sphere, Blondel turns to what he would call in later works « le néo-christianisme » (Neo-Christianity).
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Any apologetics of the Christian religion tends to superstition if it is centered primarily on emotion, on subjective aspirations or dispositions of the will, while at the same time, sidelining divinely revealed doctrine:
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In a reversal of perspective, religion, instead of appearing as the end, is taken as a means. [my italics] Instead of weighing acts according to how they come under a ritual observance, we claim to judge religious forms according to the value of the actions themselves. Instead of orienting man toward an exterior and higher object, we try to redirect his action toward his consciousness and his thought.
In these diverse ways, all sorts of people engaged in a religious or philosophical enterprise, more or less seriously, run the risk of superstitious action. These schools of thought have not gone away, of course, but represent perennial tendencies in religious practice and intellectual life. The contemporary reader can easily find postmodernists as well as onto-theologians to fit Blondel’s prescient critique.
Superstition is everywhere that human beings attempt to find ultimate fulfillment in their own capacities and strengths, their own action, as opposed to remaining open to the supernatural auxiliary from outside the natural order. Intellectuals of all convictions, metaphysicians as well as Kantian rationalists along with religious esthetes and earnest apologists, who would peddle Catholicism as a catholicon, all run the risk of the insidious autolatry of superstitious action, when they close themselves off from the transcendent and rely exclusively on human capacities.
While Blondel himself, as a philosopher, never strayed into theological territory, the acuity of his delineation between sacrament and superstition offers an incisive tool for evaluating how the nature–grace relationship is expressed in a theological system. As we shall see, there are many ways for theology to slip, unintentionally, into the phenomenon of superstition.
Nature and Grace: ‘Symbolic Exchange’
Let us first of all take the notion of ‘symbolic exchange,’ which Louis-Marie Chauvet deploys as a ground for understanding the nature–grace relationship. ‘Symbolic exchange’ is found in ‘traditional’ societies, regulating relations between individuals and groups. 32 Crucially, the objects of exchange are symbolic rather than useful or valuable in themselves: the exchange primarily establishes a change in relationship. In our civilization, we find this in gift-exchange, in which neither the utility nor the commercial value of the gift is at issue. 33
Chauvet claims that the notion of ‘symbolic exchange’ provides a model for understanding the natural in relation to the supernatural and how we ‘come into being’ through social relations:
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This process is of interest to us primarily because it furnishes us with a model, one among others no doubt, for understanding the distinctive way in which the subject comes to be in its relation with other subjects. The outstanding characteristic of this process is that it functions outside the order of value. Because of this, it opens for us a possible path by which to theologically conceive this ‘marvelous exchange’ (admirabile commercium) between God and humankind that we call grace.
This, it is claimed, maintains the utter graciousness of the divine assistance, while at the same time ensuring both the precedence of God’s gift and the necessity of human response, as return-gift.
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The human being is never passive in receiving God’s grace, but is called to reciprocate the gift, engaging in ‘symbolic exchange’:
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… there is no reception of anything as a gift which does not require some return-gift as a sign of gratitude, at the very least a ‘thank you’ or some facial expression. Which is to say that by the very structure of the exchange, the gratuitousness of the gift carries the obligation of the return-gift of a response. Therefore, theologically, grace requires not only this initial gratuitousness on which everything else depends but also the graciousness of the whole circuit, and especially of the return-gift. This graciousness qualifies the return-gift as beyond price, without calculation—in short, as a response of love. Even the return gift of our human response thus belongs to the theologically Christian concept of ‘grace.’
With regard to sacraments, Chauvet studiously avoids any appeal to causality. The sacraments are neither ‘instruments’ nor ‘causes’ of grace, in this model. Rather they are ‘expressive mediations’ in which the identification and ‘coming-to-be’ of subjects as believers occurs. They are one way in which the symbolic exchange is present in Christian life.
Now let us look more closely at ‘symbolic exchange.’ The most important observation is that it is nothing more or less than an analogy. It sets up a relationship of comparison between a created thing (symbolic exchange) and the nature–grace relationship. This relationship, like all analogies, can only be partially accurate. It is, therefore, a priori questionable whether it can bear the theoretical weight that is placed on it.
Take the human side of the exchange first of all. An immediate objection arises: what can one actually give God? The notion of ‘exchange’ as opposed to pure divine gift is, therefore, a strange analogy for the relationship of grace. While it may emphasize human responsibility in responding to God’s initiative, it also arguably ends up placing God under human obligation through the relation established by the ‘symbolic exchange.’
Now take the divine side of the exchange: what is it that God gives to the human partner in concrete actuality? While Chauvet is at pains to emphasize the relational aspect of grace and is eager to avoid any kind of ‘reification’ of grace as ‘object,’ this analogy of ritual exchange risks doing precisely what he wants to avoid. What is it that God gives us in sacraments, for example? Is this gift a thing, as the analogy of symbolic exchange would entail, even a thing that establishes or strengthens a relationship? Even worse, is it an unreal symbol or sign that points to another reality greater but in itself is without value? There is a clear danger of extrinsicism here by which grace is seen as extraneous to human life and action, rather than permeating and elevating human nature. If the sacraments are ‘merely’ symbolic pointers to another reality, rather than bringing about a real and supernatural change in themselves, then the ‘sacramental realism’ of the Catholic tradition is overlooked and we find ourselves in an idealist theology of the sacraments more suited to the Calvinist tradition.
Moreover, in a human symbolic exchange the participants are fully aware of the all the obligations and benefits of the exchange. Yet, this is impossible for human creatures who can have no direct knowledge or experience of God as God. Neither can we have direct knowledge of grace as grace, sacramental or otherwise, nor a complete understanding of the sacred mysteries and of what it is that they provide for us. Chauvet often repeats that grace is utterly beyond human comprehension and that God is ‘radically other.’ 37 How then can ‘exchange,’ symbolic or otherwise, be an adequate analogy for the relationship established in grace?
Moreover, since the reception of any gift at all entails the voluntary act of reception, it is difficult to see how this analogy provides an advantage over the traditional description of grace as pure divine ‘gift,’ which already carries within it the responsibility of human response to receive the divine gift. Even the impetus of this human response to the divine gift is itself of the order of super-natural ‘grace’—since human creatures cannot, by definition, ‘generate’ the supernatural gift through their own efforts. The loving obedience of the human will cannot be the ‘cause’ or source or basis of this grace. Only God’s agency provides ‘grace.’ Therefore, when the divine agency is conflated with the human, we end up in the phenomenon of superstition through the autolatry of human action.
Sacraments as Speech Acts
It is an ancient observation that there are no silent sacraments. Saint Augustine says as much in the adage accedit verbum ad elementum et fit sacramentum (the word comes to the element and the sacrament is made). 38 Language plays a definitive and indispensable role in sacramental action. In recent sacramental theology, much has been written about the ‘primacy’ of the sacramental word over the material symbol. 39 In the context of this ‘linguistic turn,’ so-called ‘speech act theory,’ has had a considerable influence on many theologians, including Louis-Marie Chauvet and Jean Ladrière. 40 There is, in reality, no unified ‘speech act theory,’ however. Rather, the term refers to some seminal ideas advanced in the work of John L. Austin and John R. Searle that have gained wide acceptance. Broadly speaking, the notion of ‘speech act’ or ‘performative utterance’ brings to the fore the lack of opposition between ‘saying’ and ‘doing,’ since words ‘do’ things as much as non-verbal deeds.
One lasting contribution of Austin’s original work How to Do Things with Words, however, is the triple distinction between locution, the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and meaning; illocution, the way by which in speaking one is doing something, the so-called ‘speech act’; and perlocution, the non-conventional or unpredictable result of that utterance in the world. All utterances perform an illocution, therefore, even if simply the act of assertion. The perlocutionary act is a non-conventional effect that the illocution brings about in the world: ‘Saying something will often, or even normally produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons.’ 41 This ‘perlocutionary’ act may even be unintentional. 42
Austin’s Error
Unfortunately, Austin includes the baptismal formula among his examples of ‘speech acts’ or ‘performative utterances.’ 43 This is, in fact, a disastrous proposal that has led many theologians astray. While sacraments, of course, involve speech acts they cannot qua sacraments be taken as speech acts, as purely natural human actions. Attributing the grace of the sacrament even one whit to human causation, through a blurring of the heterogeneity of divine and human agency in sacramental synergy, is to place grace within human purchase and to court the phenomenon of superstition. Let us call this ‘Austin’s Error.’ As we shall see, it is quite widespread.
One early and very lucid presentation of sacraments in terms of speech acts is the work of the Catholic linguistic philosopher, Aloysius P. Martinich.
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Marshaling evidence from Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas that the sacramental word is primary, giving ‘form’ to the ‘matter’ of the sacraments, and so showing strong affinities with Rahner, Martinich argues that speech act theory in fact brings traditional sacramental theology to fruition:
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The primacy of the sacramental words is also evidenced by the hylomorphic theory in that it makes them the form of the sacrament, that is, the thing that makes the sacrament what it is. Further, the traditional definition of the sacrament as an external sign, instituted by Christ and effecting what it signifies, might be translated into speech act parlance, as ‘an institutional illocutionary speech act with a distinct perlocutionary force.’ Thus, I believe that treating the sacraments as speech acts does not kill the tradition, but brings it to fruition.
Martinich opines that this approach ensures a ‘connection’ between the signifying or symbolic aspect of the sacraments and their effects. 46 This is because in speech act theory, as we saw above, two types of consequences are distinguished: ‘illocutionary’ effects (e.g., promising, wagering, etc.), which are conventional, and ‘perlocutionary’ effects, which are non-conventional and unpredictable. Accordingly, Martinich proposes that the scholastic distinction between res et sacramentum (the grace and the sacrament), and res tantum (grace alone) can be recast using these terms. Namely, the res et sacramentum corresponds to the illocution, and the res tantum, or sacramental grace, to the perlocution. Since grace is not limited to the sacraments, nor does it follow ineluctably from the successful execution of a sacramental ritual, therefore, he claims grace is ‘non-conventional’ and so ‘perlocutionary.’ 47
This general approach is fascinating, at least for linguists and linguistic philosophers, and it opens up sacramental formulae to modern linguistic theory. The problem, however, is that Martinich has adopted Austin’s basic error, in reducing grace to the direct effect of a natural human action, without reference to divine agency. Martinich, as a Catholic, is keenly aware, of course, that sacraments themselves cannot ‘act on’ God and is himself critical of versions of ‘moral’ causality such as that of Melchior Cano which seem to add an element of obligation, forcing God’s hand, as it were. Yet his theoretical apparatus undermines his religious intuitions. The fundamental problem is that the purely natural analysis of language or speech acts is not a sacramental ‘theology’ at all, as it avoids any consideration of divine action. 48 It is hard to see how such a thought system can avoid the charge of superstition, placing as it does the divine gift of grace squarely within human causation.
This theological mistake is perhaps difficult to avoid when the human supplants the divine as the focus of reflection on sacramental action. 49 The same critique extends to all other attempts at forcing sacramental action into an entirely humanistic natural discourse, whether of speech act theory or ritual studies. Unfortunately, a host of recent publishing manifests this forgetfulness of divine action in sacramental action, reproducing Austin’s basic error. 50
Prominent amongst such recent work is that of Louis-Marie Chauvet, who attributes the change effected by the sacraments directly to the ‘illocutionary modality’ of sacramental language. 51 The same basic error is present, and despite the theologian’s best intuitions and aspirations to the contrary his theoretical apparatus turns to superstition inasmuch as it presents a system of ideas that ignores the divine action in the world.
In relation to baptism, in particular, we see that Chauvet perpetuates Austin’s error in taking the baptismal formula to be an eminent example of a ‘performative language act’: it effects what it says when pronounced by an authorized person acting in accordance with ‘the conditions of the rite’s social validity and guarantee of the consensus of the group.’
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Baptism is a change in the status of the recipient in relation to other sacramental subjects, therefore, brought about by a performative language act:
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In the eyes of all, the baptized persons are really different from what they were before. The rite’s symbolic efficacy lies in their change of status and, since here description is prescription, in the duty enjoined on them to henceforth conform their behavior to this new status. The ritual accomplishes performatively the transition from outside-the-Church to the Church as group.
A more theological consideration follows, opening with an apparent contradiction: ‘If baptismal grace cannot be reduced theologically to the symbolic efficacy of a language act, it must still be understood within this perspective.’ 54 Here, we face the root of the problem. Chauvet of course is keenly aware that baptismal grace cannot be due to human speech acts. Yet, as with Martinich, his theological system unfortunately does what he most wants to avoid. We witness a performative contradiction: the theologian sincerely aspires to one thing, but his conceptual system achieves the contrary.
In Chauvet, baptismal grace is understood as ‘programmatic’ and ‘eschatological’: i.e., given as a task to be accomplished, as ‘a labor of giving birth to or re-begetting ourselves according to God’s Spirit’ within the general framework of ‘symbolic exchange.’ Therefore, the change brought about by baptism (whatever that is) is expressed entirely in terms of human activity:
55
It seems to us that grace (baptismal grace in this case) is not a ‘something to be received’ (even as a ‘seed’), but a self-reception: a receiving of oneself from God as son or daughter and from others as brother or sister, the two aspects being symbolically distinct but indissolubly linked. We understand it as a symbolic labor which penetrates the most real dimension of believing subjects: a fundamental work of restructuring their relation with God and with others.
Baptismal grace, therefore, is not distinct from ongoing conversion, rather than a real and supernatural change in a human soul through divine agency. It is unclear, therefore, how this treatment is equal to the descriptive task of valid but unfruitful baptism, since sacramental grace is inseparable from human efforts. 56
Chauvet, of course, decries any reduction of grace to human effort: ‘What we are proposing here is in no way a reduction of grace to the socio-linguistic mechanism of symbolic efficacy.’ Yet, his conceptual framework for sacramental grace undermines his intention. Consider the following excerpt:
57
A sacrament is an ‘event of grace’ not because it is a field in which a treasure is buried but because it symbolically ploughs the field that we ourselves are and thus renders it fruitful by converting it to the filiation and brotherly and sisterly love it proclaims to be eschatologically inaugurated in the person whom the Church acknowledges as the Son and our Brother. We understand ‘sacramental grace’ in the perspective of the relation of places between subjects and in the perspective of the recognition effected by language in its illocutionary (and performative) modality. Thus, the paternity of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Spirit are rendered effective in our world.
Is grace reducible to a speech act, as a mere human action? Absolutely not, Chauvet says, while at the same time maintaining that ‘the paternity of God’ is ‘rendered effective in our world’ through the illocutionary modality of language. The theologian’s conceptual system is not equal to his aspirations. Rather, it effectively repudiates the divine agency as operative in the world and human life. Moreover, the heterogeneity of divine and human agency in the nature–grace relationship is blurred, verging back to the phenomenon of superstition.
Symbolic Efficacy
We turn now to the relationship between the signifying or symbolic aspect of sacramental action and sacramental causality or efficacy, about which much has been written in recent years. Sacraments signify what they effect and effect what they signify, but are they primarily signs or causes? Is there, in fact, a real opposition between the two? What is the connection between causality and sacramental symbolism?
Fundamentally at issue is the relationship between the subjective efforts of the sacramental subject (ex opere operantis) and the objective efficacy of the sacrament as divine work (ex opere operatum). As we saw, any blurring of the heterogeneity of divine and human agency in the sacramental synergy courts superstition, since the supernatural can only ever be God’s gift, not something we administer to ourselves. To make sacramental efficacy, therefore, depend even one iota on human effort, whether of symbolic interpretation or otherwise, is to erect a fundamentally superstitious system of ideas.
A widespread idea in contemporary work, however, is that sacramental theology must express a relationship of mutual dependence between sacramental causality and symbolism, in the notion of ‘symbolic sacramental efficacy.’ 58 While this promises to shine light on the human contribution to sacramental synergy, mostly under-developed in the scholastic tradition, it a priori courts superstition insofar as it obscures the heterogeneity of divine and human agency in sacramental synergy, placing the supernatural gift within the merely human and natural capacity of symbolic interpretation. Pushed to its logical conclusion, it entails abandoning any distinction between subjective human effort (ex opere operantis) and the divine agency (ex opere operato) that the scholastics were anxious to preserve.
Karl Rahner’s programmatic work in the Theological Investigations towards a renewal of sacramental theology was a catalyst for this general trend. Rahner is strongly critical of the scholastic tradition for keeping sacramental symbolism and efficacy radically disconnected. To remedy this, he first proposes to recast sacramental theology in terms of a Reformed ‘theology of the Word,’ which he in turn rearticulates in terms of the allegedly metaphysical concept of Realsymbol. Common to Rahner’s various approaches, however, is the abandonment, as meaningless, of the scholastic distinction between ex opere operato and ex opere operantis. 59 Could the Catholic sacramental tradition have gotten things so very wrong and for so very long? While a detailed critique of Rahner’s voluminous proposals is beyond the scope of an article, the essence of his critique is adopted into Chauvet’s analysis of sacraments within the ‘symbolic order,’ to which we now turn.
Chauvet is highly critical of the scholastic tradition, claiming that the notion of metaphysical causality entails abandoning the ‘human element’ in sacramental action. 60 There seems no reason, however, why this human aspect or concrete symbolism of the sacraments cannot be further developed within the framework of (instrumental) causality. In any case, Chauvet decries the ‘objectivism’ of the scholastic approach, which has in recent years led to an equally objectionable ‘subjectivism,’ i.e., purely anthropological approaches, closed to the theological significance of the sacraments or even a rejection of sacraments altogether, a Barthian anti-sacramentalism. 61
In order to escape this ‘impasse’ of objectivism and subjectivism, Chauvet claims it is necessary to take the sacraments as both operators and revealers in equal measure, as ‘effective symbolic expressions’ within the symbolic exchange, the model for the relationship of grace.
62
Sacraments, therefore, neither ‘produce’ grace (another unfair critique of the scholastic approach), nor ‘translate’ a grace that is already present (à la Calvin). Rather, their efficacy as operators is ‘inseparable’ from their revelatory efficacy:
63
The sacraments are not instruments for the production of grace since their operation, of the symbolic order, is inseparable from the revelation they bring about. But no more are they simply instruments for the translation of a grace that is already there, since the revelation they make of it is inseparable from a symbolic labor, new each time, within the believing subject.
Sacraments, therefore, are revealers (insofar as they are operators) and operators (insofar as they are revealers).
One could take issue with the above statement that the operation of the sacraments is ‘inseparable’ from the revelation they bring about. How is this more than a simple re-assertion that sacraments are at once symbolic and efficacious, that they effect what they signify? Let us focus, however, on the substantive issue—that of the relation between the efficacy of sacraments (as sources of supernatural grace in human life) with their efficacy as revealers (revealing God’s will to human beings). The former is God’s work and God’s work alone. The latter is human work, albeit helped along by grace.
The fundamental problem facing any articulation of sacramental causality in terms of ‘symbolic efficacy’ is the risk of conflating divine and human agency, ending up in the claim that human beings, through their own efforts of symbolic interpretation, administer to themselves the divine gift that can come only as the unique and gratuitous initiative of Christ, acting through the sacrament.
Conclusions
Blondel’s philosophy, therefore, permits a retrieval of important insights from Aquinas and the scholastic tradition—insisting on the centrality of the divine agency in sacramental theology, as well as the absolute heterogeneity of the divine and human agencies in sacramental synergy.
We have argued that sacramental synergy is not a ‘mixture’ of divine and human agency, no matter how veiled or obliquely expressed. Rather, and in a way analogous to the impossibility of ‘mixing’ the divine and human natures in the Incarnation, theology must maintain the absolute heterogeneity in synergy of the divine and the human. To do otherwise is to descend into a superstitious discourse, and we saw several examples—the notion of ‘symbolic exchange’ as a model for the divine assistance in the nature–grace relationship, the reduction of sacraments to speech acts, and the concept of ‘symbolic efficacy.’
Moreover, in promoting ‘symbolic efficacy’ some theologians castigate the scholastic synthesis for its alleged ‘disconnection’ of sacramental causality or efficacy from sacramental symbolism. It is important to point out that this critique is unfounded. It is also inevitable when the divine agency is displaced from the theologian’s field of view, being entirely supplanted by human activity, in combination with a philosophical idealism that effectively repudiates the divine as efficient metaphysical cause of anything.
It is here that Blondel’s philosophy of action brings to the fore an insight that was already very present within the scholastic synthesis, especially in Aquinas’s use of instrumental causality: sacramental efficacy (causality) and sacramental symbolism are indeed ‘connected,’ but in the mind of God, not of human beings. That is to say, simply—the sacraments express the divine will, and not merely human intention. Like the other sensory signs of Revelation, they call out for human interpretation and understanding, leading both to the speculative knowledge of the theologian and the connatural familiarity that comes only with years of religious practice. Like scripture, the sacraments are inexhaustible expressions of the divine intention that we are called to savor and strive to appropriate, both on an individual and ecclesiastical level. The sacrament as sensory sign, however, only signifies naturally and equivocally what Christ brings about supernaturally and invincibly in the divine–human synergy of the sacramental act.
Footnotes
1
See Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of Worship,’ Theological Investigations 19:141–49; Colman O’Neill OP, Sacramental Realism: A General Theory of the Sacraments (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983), 139–42.
2
For discussion of Blondel’s influence on theological understanding of the nature–supernature relationship see Peter J. Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism & Action Française: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 2009), 145–73; John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge & Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014).
3
Maurice Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel: propos recueillis par Frédéric Lefèvre, ed. Frédéric Lefèvre (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1966), 35–36.
4
See Cathal Doherty SJ, Maurice Blondel on the Supernatural in Human Action: Sacrament and Superstition (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
5
Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason, W.S. Pluhar trans., Hackett, 2009, §193–94; ‘The delusion that through religious acts of cult we accomplish anything in regard to justification before God is religious superstition, just as the delusion of wanting to bring this about by striving for a supposed interaction with God is religious fanaticism. It is superstitious delusion to want to become pleasing to God through actions that any human being can perform without exactly needing to be a good human being (e.g., by confession of statutory dogmas, by heeding church observance and discipline and the like). The delusion is called superstitious, however, because it selects mere means of nature (not moral means), which by themselves can have absolutely no effect on what is not nature.’
6
Nonetheless, since the human will is crucial to the delineation between sacrament and superstition, so all ritual activity, including the sacraments, can verge to superstitious action in practice, depending on the object of the human will. See Peter Henrici, ‘L’ambivalence du rite selon Maurice Blondel,’ Communio 38 (2013): 40–50.
7
Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. by Oliva Blanchette, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 382; ‘On the one hand, no act naturally born of religious belief perfects or equals its dignity. On the other hand, faith is possible only under the species of a defined letter and through the efficacy of a practical submission; and the true infinite could be immanent only in action; it is therefore necessary for this action itself to be the object of a positive precept, and for it to start, no longer from the movement of our nature, but from the divine order.’
8
Blondel, Action (1893), 382.
9
Blondel, Action (1893), 364–65.
10
It therefore covers the Aristotelian distinctions between poïein, prattein, and theorein. See Blondel, Action (1893), 198.
11
Maurice Blondel, ‘La tâche de la philosophie d’après la philosophie de l’action,’ Annales de philosophie chrétienne 153 (1906): 47–59 (52); ‘The living idea is born from action and tends towards action; … the idea of action is contained in thought, action contains thought …’ [My translation]
12
Blondel, Action (1893), 53.
13
Blondel, Action (1893), 284.
14
Blondel, Action (1893), 284.
15
Blondel, Action (1893), 286.
16
Blondel, Action (1893), 286: ‘What man cannot grasp, express, or produce, is precisely what he projects outside of himself to make it the object of a cult, as if in his inability to touch it within himself, he hoped to reach it better by placing it in the infinite. And, in a reverse movement, but one that is no less surprising, what he sets infinitely above himself is precisely what he pretends to dominate, monopolize, absorb, as if he had divinized it only to require imperiously a satisfying response to the creative call of an avid heart. Thus we want to realize outside what escapes us inside, with the secret aim of somehow imprisoning this infinite in the finite of a real object, with the inward hope that this is the true way of conquering it and of finally having in a perfect action, the coveted conclusion, security, and repose. Εν τω αυτω περας και απειρον (the finite and the infinite is one and the same). The finite infinite, the infinite possessed and used, that is the meaning and the ambition of the ritual act.’
17
Blondel, Action (1893), 287.
18
Blondel, Action (1893), 286.
19
Blondel, Action (1893), 288: ‘There is no act, no matter how vile, where man has not placed the divine, no act that has not aroused some idolatry.’
20
Blondel, Action (1893), 291–92: ‘It remains for us to discover how, instead of juxtaposing itself by a positive cult to other distinct acts, superstition more subtly and less visibly insinuates itself into all the forms of practice, thought, science, metaphysics, art, natural morality; so that, precisely where it seems dead, for lack of any apparent object and positive cult, it comes back to life more imperceptibly and more imperiously.’
21
Blondel, Action (1893), 289.
22
Blondel, Action (1893), 288: ‘What then, in short, is the object of the superstitious cult? Under a borrowed form … it is the expression of that inexhaustible depth of the interior life which no particular life has equaled, it is a desire that embodies itself, the desire for an infinite response to an infinite tendency. And since it is the impenetrable secret of his individual consciousness that man adores in this way, he is led, by the very progress of his reflexion, to conceive this mysterious object according to the type of his humanity, but of a humanity such that it cannot be realized in him, and which remains the permanent and mobile advance of his ideal over his real development.’
23
Blondel, Action (1893), 292.
24
Blondel, Action (1893), 293.
25
Blondel, Action (1893), 293: ‘What does this mean, if not that human action, by its own strength, pretends to assimilate, even to the point of exhausting it, all that knowledge cannot attain or that the will cannot fully embrace?’
26
Blondel, Action (1893), 293.
27
Blondel, Action (1893), 293; ‘ … as if, through the honor he renders his god in affirming and defining it, he were subordinating it entirely; as if, penetrating into the intimacy of infinite power, wisdom and sanctity, because he has forged himself an ideal of perfection, he were about to participate in it himself and become in reality that which he has declared to be inaccessible, that which has no other meaning in his consciousness than to be incommunicable and mysterious? Does he not transform the metaphysical phenomenon, which he has interiorly at his disposal, into a substance, into a Being which he thinks he has at his disposal exteriorly?’
28
Blondel, Action (1893), 295.
29
Blondel, Action (1893), 295.
30
Maurice Blondel, Exigences philosophiques du christianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1950), 42–43.
31
Blondel, Action (1893), 292.
32
Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1995), 101–2.
33
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 107.
34
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 99–100.
35
The phrase admirabile commercium, however, evokes the Incarnation, rather than the grace we receive in the existential circumstances of life. The ‘marvelous exchange’ of the human and divine in the Incarnation is the source and principle of all grace, but the hypostatic union is not the graced relationship with the divine into which all other humans are called.
36
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 108–9.
37
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 443; ‘Besides, as with everything concerning God, from the first we declare grace to be irreducible to any explanations. Without this proviso we would reduce the theological to the anthropological, and theology would be only a variant within the social sciences. Now, as soon as God’s radical otherness is neglected or erased, God can no longer interest us except as a cultural idea or a cipher for humanity; but one cannot give one’s faith to an “idea” or to a “cipher” … What we are proposing here is in no way a reduction of grace to the socio-linguistic mechanism of symbolic efficacy.’
38
Aquinas often refers to this in the Summa Theologiae, e.g., S.T. III, q. 60, 4 sed contra.
39
See, for example, Karl Rahner, ‘The Word and the Eucharist,’ Theological Investigations 4: 253–86.
40
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, passim; see also Jean Ladrière, ‘The Performativity of Liturgical Language,’ in Liturgical Experience of Faith, eds Herman A.P. Schmidt and David N. Power (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973), 50–62.
41
John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 101.
42
Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 121–22.
43
Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 11, 14, 23 n.1, 24, 35.
44
Aloysius P. Martinich, ‘Sacraments and Speech Acts I,’ The Heythrop Journal 16 (1975): 289–303; ‘Sacraments and Speech Acts II,’ The Heythrop Journal 16 (1975): 405–17.
45
Martinich, ‘Sacraments and Speech Acts I,’ 293–94.
46
Martinich, ‘Sacraments and Speech Acts II,’ 414–15.
47
Ibid., 415–16. Curiously, however, he does not consider the notion of sacramentum tantum.
48
See also Bruno Brinkman’s rebuttal of Martinich; Bruno Brinkman SJ, ‘‘Sacramental Man’ and Speech Acts Again,’ The Heythrop Journal 16 (1975): 418–20.
49
See O’Neill, Sacramental Realism, 141–42.
50
These include, at least, Mervyn Duffy, How Language, Ritual and Sacraments Work: According to John Austin, Jürgen Habermas and Louis-Marie Chauvet (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2005); Siobhán Garrigan, Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); Eugene R. Schlesinger, ‘Sacramental Efficacy in Karl Rahner and Cognitive Linguistics,’ Philosophy & Theology 25 (2013): 337–60.
51
Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 429: ‘The efficacious nature which characterizes them is such that their verbal formulations do not act as simple commentaries on an action that would be exterior to them, but as actions symbolic in themselves. Whether it expresses praise, belief, petition, desire, or confession … the liturgy is always within a particular kind of language whose unity seems assured, among other things, by its illocutionary modality. It is always the establishment of a new relation of place between the community and God which it seeks to accomplish and purports to achieve. And it is always, at the same time, the instauration or restoration of a cohesion among the members of the group, of their mutual reconciliation, of their communion in the same identity which is at work in the act of ritual language: it aims not at discursively thematizing the criteria of the community, but at constituting it by enunciating them.’
52
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 438–39.
53
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 439.
54
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 439.
55
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 442.
56
Chauvet in fact does address the question of efficacy versus fruitfulness in baptism: ‘The rite may be perfectly efficacious on the symbolic level of the subject’s new status within the Church, without, for all that, this intra-linguistic efficacy being accompanied by an extra-linguistic efficacy concerning the gift and reception of grace itself.’ Sacramental grace, therefore, effects something other than the task of ‘self-giving’ on the ‘symbolic’ level. But what is that something? The question is essentially left unanswered. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 444.
57
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 442–43.
58
In addition to Karl Rahner and Louis-Marie Chauvet, Edward Schillebeeckx, in his early work, also proposed a version of symbolic efficacy, which drew criticism for seeming to make sacramental grace the direct result of subjective human effort. See Argimiro Turrado, ‘La teología del P.E.H. Schillebeeckx O.P. Causalidad simbólica instrumental,’ Augustinianum 2 (1962): 40–72.
59
Karl Rahner, ‘The Word and the Eucharist,’ 270.
60
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 411–12.
61
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 416–24.
62
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 425: ‘In understanding the sacraments as “effective symbolic expressions,” we are obviously in direct continuity with what we have said about language and symbol throughout the first part of this book. We base ourselves especially on the concept of “expression” and on the notions of the “illocutionary,” the “performative,” and the “symbolic efficacy” of rites.’
63
Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 431.